They Sleep Without Dreaming: Stories

Although nothing quite happens in these witty, tragic, often brilliant stories, something always seems to have just taken place or to be about to descend. There is a sense of portentousness in ""The Hinge,'' wherein Polish-born Wanda and Boleslaw fly from London to make contact in Warsaw with the aged, crippled Kakia, an Underground fighter undaunted by her years in Auschwitz. The moment of eclipse in a soprano's career is caught and preserved in ``Addio,'' as Madame Alba sings the role of the Countess in The Marriage of Figaro an octave lower ``to save my instrument.'' Perhaps the most satisfying of all these strolls around the peripheries of people's livesand blinding glances into themtakes place in ``On Each Other's Time,'' about a high-minded, deeply caring family who seem as if they've never been apart when they gather, from their various locations around the globe, at their family home in England. Gilliatt's readers will delight in and puzzle over the offhand wit of characters whose fundamental gravity it never altogether masks. Foreign rights: Georges Borchardt. October 21